Mission Markets News Update

We have been reading increasing numbers of articles and blog posts about Impact Investing in both traditional and social media outlets. We are excited to see word of impact investing getting out. The media is creating buzz that will ultimately contribute to the growth of the entire space.

Here are links to some reading material that we found interesting:

"At SOCAP, Lessons on Measuring the Impact of Investments"
- Conservation International Blog

"Pension Funds Buy into Sustainable Investing"
- Triple Pundit Blog

"Can high impact investing yield returns?"
- Interactive Investor

"B Lab Advances Stakeholder Capitalism"
- Capital Institute Blog

"IRIS Project Overview"
- Scribd

"Learning from Mistakes: Following up on Failed Ventures"
- Acumen Fund Blog

We hope you enjoy your reading. Your comments are always welcome!

- The Mission Markets Team

B Corp Retreat Update

Mission Markets attended the B Corp Retreat yesterday in Long Branch, NJ. Some fellow B Corps also in attendance were Better World Books, CSRWire, Grassroots Capital, Murex Investments, and Singlebrook Technologies. It was a great opportunity for us to continue building our networks and we were inspired by the stories we heard from the B Corp community. The discussions of the day centered around three issue areas: Policy, Increasing B Corp numbers and visibility, and Impact Investing.

Today, we will be at the Social Venture Network's Fall Conference. Stay tuned for an update next week!

-The Mission Markets Team

Mike Van Patten quoted in Ecosystem Marketplace

Mission Markets CEO Mike Van Patten was quoted along with ecologist David Hill in a recent Ecosystem Marketplace article on environmental credit markets. Here is the section of the article that talks about Mission Markets:

"Van Patten, who just unleashed his own ecosystem exchange platform in the United States, Mission Markets Earth, says absence of a regulatory driver does not pose a significant hurdle.

'If you show policy makers you already have landowners who want to do this on a voluntary basis they’ll start a regulatory market,' he says from his home office in Greenwich, Ct."

Click here to read more!

-The Mission Markets Team

Mission Markets in Ashoka Changemakers blog and Wired Magazine

 Mission Markets was featured in an "Idea exChange" blog post written by Ashoka's Changemakers program. The post was entitled "SOCAP10 Recap: Woodstock for Social Entrepreneurs". According to their recap, the conference "reverberated as a call to action to technology and investment infrastructures that heretofore have glossed over the practice of impact investing", and Mike Van Patten was quoted in the post. To read the full recap click here.

We were also featured in the October edition of Wired Magazine in an article entitled "The New Green Economy". The article looks at programs that assign economic value to nature and discusses the fragmentation of the space as a whole. Here is a section of the article:

"That's what Michael Van Patten hopes to change. In a small loft on Manhattan's Hudson Street, just west of SoHo, Van Patten presides over an office so new there's nothing adorning its white walls. In early spring, the view was of a construction site across the street, where a large building was being demolished. But though he'd been working in the space for a month, Van Patten hadn't even noticed the project. He had other things on his mind, namely the impending soft launch of Mission Markets, his investment platform for social and environmental markets. A former bond trader, Van Patten has spent the past two years positioning himself as the consummate expert on the "markets" portion of ecosystem markets. 'We're trying to make it easier for investors to identify what these projects are,' he says.

Environmental markets are about more than just equity and debt. 'They have values that investors care about,' says David Meyers, Mission Markets' COO and a biological anthropologist who spent years working on conservation projects in Madagascar before earning an MBA from Yale. 'People are fed up with investing with no morals.'

Mission Markets, the first company of its kind, hopes to make environmental investing "more liquid and less fragmented" by turning ecosystem services into asset classes, just like stocks or bonds. A private platform will help match accredited investors with companies seeking capital for conservation projects. An open-access platform will enable anyone to invest in various types of credits, bonds and offsets, from the simple to the overwhelmingly complex.

Still, finding companies looking for investors is the easy part. 'We have 90-plus issuers that have expressed interest, and we haven't done any marketing yet,' van Patten says, 'The difficult part is getting people to invest. One of the biggest challenges is to teach people and these markets.'"

Click here to read the full article.

-The Mission Markets Team

Weekly News Update from the Mission Markets Team

We are happy to see Impact Investing making more of an appearance in the news lately! Here are some of the articles that we thought were particularly relevant to what we do and our vision for the future of the space. We hope you find them interesting and useful. Your comments are welcome, as always!

"'Impact Investing' Teeters on the Edge of Explosive Growth"
-The New York Times

"Money Catches up With Meaning in Social Enterprise"
-The Huffington Post

"IGNIA Fund I Invests MX$38.1 million in Barafon, and Innovative Provider of Public Telecommunications and Related Services to Low Income Populations"
-PR Newswire

"Social Investment Company ResponsAbility Makes Debt Investments Totaling $2.8m in Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) Pearl Microfinance Limited of Uganda and fondiBESA of Albania"
-Microcapital.org

"Kenyan Regulator to Link Investors With Technology Companies"
- Bloomberg Business Week

Happy Reading!

-The Mission Markets Team

Mike Van Patten quoted in Schooled Green Blog

Today, there was an interesting article on the Schooled Green blog about water quality credit markets entitled "Finding the Money in Water: Why You Should Watch the Chesapeake". Mike shared some of his insights as an expert on the subject. Here is a brief quote from the post:

"Fortune magazine has called water the oil of the 21st century. As watersheds around the world become increasingly strained, thirsty communities and businesses will be in the market for anything that can ensure sustainable access to this life-or-death resource. To understand this rapidly growing ecosystem, I sat down with Mike Van Patten, CEO of Mission Markets Earth. Mike specializes in trading environmental credits for things like wetland mitigation and water quality, and asked him where to find the hottest market opportunity on his radar. He answered before I could blink. 'No question,' he said, 'it's the nitrogen and phosphorous emissions markets in the Chesapeake Bay.'"


To read the full article, click here.

-The Mission Markets Team

Mission Markets

A CSR Minute video story featuring Mission Markets was just featured on Reuters Insider. Check it out here!



-The Mission Markets Team

Mission Markets in the Huffington Post

We just saw that our platform was mentioned in a recent Huffington Post article by journalist and social entrepreneur Gail Vida Hamburg, who we met at SoCap: 

"Nevertheless, it is technology that will allow social entrepreneurs increased access to capital. The most exciting advance in social enterprise is Mission Markets recent introduction of an online investment exchange that facilitates relationships between socially and environmentally responsible enterprises and impact investors. This elegant platform will enable the flourishing of a vibrant marketplace where entrepreneurs and investors can make deals to co-create mission driven companies. It is a vehicle for impact writ large."

You can read the full article here. 

-The Mission Markets Team

Mission Markets Required Reading: 'Impact Investing Teeters on the Edge of Explosive Growth'

"'Impact Investing' Teeters on the Edge of Explosive Growth"
We were pleased to see this article on Impact Investing in the New York Times this weekend and wanted to share it with our readers. The article mentions SOCAP10's resounding success as an indicator of the potential for future growth in the industry.

-The Mission Markets Team

SOCAP Update: DAY 2

SOCAP really hit its stride here on Tuesday.  With even more sessions on the schedule across twelve parallel conference tracks, it was even more difficult to decide where to go when.

Once again you can find complete coverage of these sessions on the main SOCAP site and once again Mission Markets offers you a few highlights here.

With so many excellent choices, it was tough to decide which was the best talk of the day.  But after much deliberation the Mission Markets Team voted for the session on "Mapping the Space of Marketplaces", which just happened to feature Mission Markets CEO Mike Van Patten.

To those of you who might accuse us of prejudice, we ask you to consider that CNBC and Yahoo! Finance also selected Mike's contribution as its featured SOCAP coverage of the day!

To be fair, Mike was not alone on the stage of the Cowell Auditorium, SOCAP's largest and most highly featured venue.  The panel also included representatives from Microplace, NeXii, and The Hoop.

After brief individual introductions of these variations on the theme of impact-driven marketplaces, there was a highly interactive discussion on the state of the on-line market space.

Some of the most significant ideas from that discussion included the challenges of working in what has historically been a highly fragmented investment space, the importance of the adoption of standards, and predictions for the volume of transactions to increase dramatically in the very near future.

Another hidden gem in today's jam-packed schedule was the "Deep Dive Into the Evergreen Cooperative Initiative."  This panel brought together the Rockefeller Foundation, the Cleveland Foundation and Veris Wealth Management to share their promising new model for revitalizing urban neighborhoods in Cleveland.

Cleveland is a city clearly suffering from all the social and economic ills that plagued rust-belt cities across the midwest.  But the city is fighting back with new cooperative businesses that not only generate desperately needed new jobs and services for local anchor institutions, but also build ownership and wealth for communities where the median income is less than $20,000.

This strategy develops businesses that not only generate jobs but the opportunity for residents to have a financial stake in the companies that are rebuilding their community.  The Evergreen Initiative is about connecting anchor institutions to the businesses that generate jobs and wealth.  We hope SOCAP invites them back next year to report on their progress.

Tomorrow is Wednesday and SOCAP's swan song, at least for 2010.  As in previous years, the last day's format is wide-open, with the agenda set mainly by the attendees themselves.

Anything can happen in such an environment, so please stay tuned to this channel for our report on how SOCAP's final day unfolds.

- The Mission Markets Team

SOCAP Update: DAY 1

Mission Markets has had a productive and inspiring first day here at SOCAP!

We have been giving live demos and signing up issuers and investors all day at our exhibitor booth (above) and have attended as many of the excellent panel discussions as we could manage.

Coverage of all these sessions through a variety of media channels can be found on the SOCAP site but here are some highlights from what we've seen for ourselves:

The talk on "Connecting Private Capital Markets to Impact Investing Opportunities" was completely jam-packed.  This is a terrific indicator of how much excitement there is around impact investing, but we were lucky to even find a seat on the floor!

Many of the panelists commented on the exact marketplace deficiencies that led to the creation of Mission Markets:

Ron Cordes of The Cordes Foundation noted that there was no good way to find and compare impact investing opportunities.

Greg Ulrich of Money for Good said that the inability of knowing where to find good investment opportunities combined with insufficient ratings and benchmarks presented significant barriers to impact investors.

We were impatiently awaiting the opportunity to explain how Mission Markets directly addresses these issues, when  moderator Gerhard Pries of Sarona Asset Management beat us to the punch - and told the crowd about the recent lauch of our platform!  Looks like the word on Mission Markets is officially out!!

You should also check out Hope Consulting's insightful and well-researched Money for Good survey on Impact Investing which was discussed at some length in this session.

Since impact measurement is such a core part of the Mission Markets model, we were also sure not to miss the session on "Harmonizing Tools to Measure Impact".

This was another standing room only crowd, at least partly due to the excitement around the near-simultaneous official launch of the IRIS 2.0 taxonomy of impact indicators.  For the record, Mission Markets is a long-time advocate of IRIS (and the standardization it affords our sector) going all the way back to pre-version 1.0 :)

This session really brought home the message that IRIS is just one piece of the larger metrics measurement puzzle.  With IRIS as a foundation, an entire performance ecosystem becomes possible, including the GIIRS Morningstar-style impact ratings report, and the PULSE portfolio management system for impact measurement.

We will continue to closely follow the impact investing and metrics tracks here at SOCAP, so please stay tuned for more on-the-spot updates on these topics - and others - as the conference continues…

- The Mission Markets Team

SoCap, Here We Come!

As we pack our bags for SoCap10, we just wanted to give our readers an update on what we expect to get out of the conference by answering a few questions that we were encouraged to answer on the SoCap Community Site.

What are you looking forward to at SoCap10? 

Mission Markets is looking forward to presenting our recently launched, cutting-edge private impact investment exchange to the SoCap community of investors, entrepreneurs and innovators. Our CEO, Mike Van Patten, will be presenting a demo showing exactly how our innovative online marketplace will increase the flow of capital into the impact investing space, which the Monitor Institute predicts will be a $500 billion industry within the next 5 years.

What are you passionate about at the intersection of money and meaning?

The Mission Markets team is passionate about using our unique value proposition to connect buyers and sellers within the currently fragmented impact investing sectors. Most socially and environmentally focused companies and organizations are too small or specialized to access conventional capital markets. Investors seeking to expand their holdings in impact investments are often only aware of a limited number of available opportunities. We address these issues by providing a single destination for consistent, comprehensive financial and impact data on mission-driven companies and organizations seeking to raise capital and we also facilitate the transaction itself.

What do you want to get out of the event? 

We are looking forward to introducing ourselves and our platform to many of the key stakeholders in the space and showing them how we can add value to their sectors.

We can’t wait to tell you how it goes. Stay tuned for more updates from San Francisco!

-The Mission Markets Team